Friday, October 11, 2013

Thanks to a woman quitting her job, Kanye's 'Gone" re-enters the billboard top 20 after eight years

The power of YouTube and a creative video...

Kanye West's eight-year-old song Gone has jumped into the top 20 of Billboard's Hot 100chart after being featured in a video of a woman quitting her job.

Comedian and writer Marina Shifrin performed "an interpretive dance" to Gone in the offices of her employer, Taiwan's Next Media Animation, using subtitles to complain about working conditions and a corporate focus on quantity over quality. The video currently has over 15 million views, and Shifrin went on to appear on TV worldwide. Next Media Animation themselves — best known for their own viral success with videos that portray world news through the medium of panda-led 3D animation — produced a retaliatory clip using the same song. That video clocked up another 4 million views, points that also go towards Gone's placement.

This marks the second time a song featured in a viral video hit has cracked the upper reaches of official charts on the strength of YouTube views. Billboard incorporated the measure into its statistics in February of this year, an inclusion that was just in time to catch the Harlem Shake phenomenon and propel US DJ Baauer's song to the top of the Hot 100 chart. Gone hasn't had the runaway success of the Harlem Shake — West's 2005 song debuted in 18th place — but its high placement is a prime example of why record labels and artists might want to wait before issuing notices of copyright infringement to users of old licensed content.Source: billboard.com; youtube.com